Wojak

The Wojak specimen presents the lab with a classification problem unlike any other in the archive. Most memes are templates — fixed formats that carry variable content. Pepe is an emotional vocabulary. Doge is a syntactic structure. Wojak is something different: a speciation engine. A single, deliberately featureless MS Paint drawing of a bald man that has generated more distinct, independently viable variants than any other meme lineage in recorded internet history. At last count, Know Your Meme documents over 100 named Wojak derivatives. The actual number — counting regional variants, one-off edits, and the daily output of Soyjak.party — is beyond meaningful enumeration.

Wojak is the internet’s everyman, and like every everyman, his power comes from emptiness. He has no personality, no backstory, no distinguishing features. He is a blank mannequin onto which the internet hangs whatever psychological costume the moment demands. Sad? That’s Wojak. Angry? Also Wojak. Euphoric? Wojak in a different hat. The specimen doesn’t just survive mutation — it requires it. A Wojak that stays in one form is a dead Wojak. The organism lives by changing.

The Drawing

Sometime in September 2009, a user named “Wojak” posted a simple MS Paint drawing to the Polish imageboard Vichan. The image depicted a bald man with a simple, sad expression — two dots for eyes, a downturned line for a mouth, and the general demeanor of someone who just realized it’s only Tuesday. The original title was “Ciepła Twarz,” which translates to “Warm Face” in Polish — a name that carries a tenderness entirely absent from the image’s eventual use.

The drawing’s technical quality is important: it is deliberately primitive. No fine lines, no shading, no anatomical accuracy. The face is barely a face — more of a suggestion of a face, a placeholder where a human might go. This crudeness is not a bug. It is the structural feature that makes the entire Wojak lineage possible. You cannot project yourself onto a detailed portrait. You can project yourself onto an empty oval with two dots for eyes, because the less specific the face, the more universal it becomes.

The image migrated from Vichan to Krautchan — a German-language imageboard with a significant international user base — where English-speaking users began referring to it simply as “Wojak” after the original poster’s username. This is the meme’s first irony: Wojak the character is named after Wojak the person, but Wojak the person is anonymous. A featureless man named after a nameless man. The metaphor writes itself.

The Feels

The Wojak image arrived on 4chan’s /b/ and /r9k/ boards around 2010-2011, where it merged with the “feels” lexicon already in circulation. “That feel when” (TFW) was an existing greentext format — a way of describing emotions too specific or too embarrassing for direct statement. What the format lacked was a face. Wojak provided one.

The marriage was immediate and permanent. “tfw no gf” was no longer just text — it was text accompanied by a bald, sad man staring into the middle distance with the resignation of someone who has tried everything and found it all wanting. The face didn’t just illustrate the feeling; it legitimized it. On a platform defined by ironic detachment, Wojak’s naked sincerity functioned as a loophole. You could post about loneliness, depression, social failure, and existential emptiness — topics that would be ruthlessly mocked in direct statement — by framing them through Wojak. The face said “I’m being sincere” in a space where sincerity was banned. The meme was emotional contraband.

The first major mutation confirmed this function: “I Know That Feel Bro” (May 2011) depicted two Wojak figures embracing. No text was necessary. The image of two anonymous, featureless men hugging communicated more genuine emotion than most internet content manages in ten thousand words. It was shared millions of times. It remains, in the lab’s estimation, one of the most affecting images the internet has produced — which is an absurd thing to say about a crude MS Paint drawing, but the lab deals in absurd truths.

The TFW Economy

By 2012-2013, Wojak had become the internet’s default emotional avatar. The “tfw” format expanded to cover every conceivable human state:

• tfw no gf — the original, the ur-feel
• tfw Monday — the universal
• tfw you realize you’ve been on 4chan for 8 hours — the self-aware
• tfw you almost said something in the group chat but deleted it — the specific
• tfw you wake up at 3am and remember something from 2009 — the existential

The format crossed from 4chan to Reddit to Tumblr to Twitter, carrying Wojak with it. “Right in the feels” entered spoken English — people said it out loud, in physical spaces, to other humans who could see their real faces. When internet syntax escapes the internet, the source meme has achieved escape velocity. By 2014, Wojak was no longer a 4chan meme. He was infrastructure — the load-bearing wall of internet emotional expression.

The Speciation Event

What happened between 2017 and 2020 is the most productive period of memetic speciation the lab has ever documented. Wojak didn’t just mutate — he radiated, producing an explosion of distinct variants adapted to specific ecological niches, like Darwin’s finches if Darwin’s finches were about internet psychology.

Brainlet (2017) was the opening salvo. Wojak redrawn with a tiny, smooth brain visible through a transparent skull — the face of someone confidently stating something provably wrong. Brainlet spawned the “expanding brain” format: a gradient from tiny brain (obvious take) to normal brain (moderate take) to galaxy brain (take so advanced it may be idiotic again). The format’s power was in the implication that intelligence exists on a spectrum and that the smartest position might be indistinguishable from the stupidest.

Pink Wojak (January 2018) arrived with the crypto crash. Wojak’s face flushed pink-to-red, eyes bulging, mouth open in a soundless scream of financial devastation. Where Brainlet mocked intelligence, Pink Wojak externalized a very specific form of suffering: the anguish of watching numbers go down when you bet they’d go up. Crypto Twitter adopted Pink Wojak as the universal face of portfolio liquidation. Every red candle got a Pink Wojak. Every -30% day produced ten thousand instances of the same bald, screaming, pink man. The meme persists because the market keeps providing occasions for its use.

NPC Wojak (September 2018) was the first variant to trigger real-world institutional response. Wojak redrawn as a flat grey face with completely empty features — a non-player character, the kind of background figure in a video game that repeats the same three lines of dialogue regardless of what happens around them. The argument, rendered in meme form: most people are running on autopilot, reacting with pre-programmed responses, never generating a genuinely original thought. Twitter suspended thousands of accounts using NPC Wojak profile pictures. The New York Times published an explainer. CNN ran a segment. A meme about conformity produced conformist media coverage about the dangers of conformity memes — a recursion so perfect it could have been scripted by the meme itself.

The -Oomer Pipeline

In late 2018, Wojak underwent the mutation event that would define its modern era. The -oomer variants didn’t just modify Wojak’s appearance — they turned him into a personality typology system. Each variant mapped a specific demographic-psychological archetype with the precision of a clinical assessment and the cruelty of a high school cafeteria seating chart.

Doomer came first. Black beanie, cigarette, dark circles under hollow eyes, shoulders permanently slumped. Doomer has read enough Nietzsche to know God is dead but not enough Camus to enjoy the sunshine anyway. He listens to Radiohead or obscure post-punk or nothing at all. He walks alone at 2 AM not because he’s going somewhere but because his apartment is worse than outside. Doomer is the most aestheticized despair in the Wojak genus — a meme that makes nihilism look like a lifestyle choice, which is both the joke and the problem.

Doomer Girl followed almost immediately and achieved a cultural trajectory entirely separate from her male counterpart. Black hair, dark makeup, choker, same thousand-yard stare. She became a widely drawn fan-art subject, an aesthetic icon, and a genuine character that people attached to emotionally — an unusual outcome for a meme that originated as intentionally crude MS Paint art. Doomer Girl proved that Wojak variants could transcend their template origins and function as actual characters with perceived inner lives.

30 Year Old Boomer inverted the energy completely. Receding hairline, wraparound sunglasses, cargo shorts, Monster Energy can in one hand and a push mower in the other. Not an actual baby boomer — a millennial who has surrendered to the comforts of middle age and is at peace with it. Boomer Wojak mows his lawn on Saturday morning, listens to ’90s rock without irony, and doesn’t know what Discord is. He’s happy. It took Wojak fifteen years to produce a variant that was genuinely happy.

Bloomer arrived as Doomer’s redemption arc. Same basic face, but with a genuine smile, headphones on, flowers blooming in the background. Bloomer has been through the despair phase and emerged on the other side. He exercises. He journals. He called his mom. The Doomer-to-Bloomer pipeline became one of the internet’s most shared self-improvement narratives, which means that a crudely drawn bald man from a Polish imageboard is now functioning as a mental health framework. The lab does not editorialize, but: we are truly in the dumbest possible timeline and it’s kind of beautiful.

Zoomer completed the generational trio. Broccoli haircut, AirPods permanently installed, TikTok-saturated attention span. Coomer covered internet pornography addiction with an unflinching directness that made most people uncomfortable. Each new variant filled a psychological niche that didn’t have a name until the meme gave it one. The -oomer system wasn’t describing existing archetypes — it was creating them. People started identifying as Doomers. They called their friends Boomers. The meme had reverse-engineered a personality framework.

Soyjak and Its Consequences

Soyjak (2019) deserves a separate section because it achieved something the other variants didn’t: it spawned its own platform.

The variant: Wojak wearing glasses, sporting a patchy beard, and making the “soy face” — mouth wide open in a perfect O of performative excitement. The expression targets a specific behavior: the kind of exaggerated enthusiasm that internet culture reads as fake, corporate, or emasculated. Soyjak pointing excitedly at something while another Soyjak points at the first Soyjak creates a recursion of mockery that comments on its own commentary.

In 2021, Soyjak.party launched — an entire imageboard dedicated exclusively to Soyjak variants. At peak activity, the site hosted thousands of daily posts, each contributing new Soyjak edits. Community members (“jakkers”) developed elaborate lore, created “gemerald” (gem-quality) edits, and waged edit wars with the enthusiasm of medieval monks illuminating manuscripts, if those monks were deeply online and primarily motivated by the desire to make fun of people who like Marvel movies.

A single meme mutation spawned its own platform, community, culture, and vocabulary. This is unprecedented. Even Pepe — the most culturally significant meme the lab has cataloged — never generated a dedicated imageboard. Soyjak did. The implications for memetic theory are significant: Wojak variants are not just memes. They are substrates capable of supporting entire ecosystems.

Yes Chad and the Dialectic

Yes Chad (March 2020) — also known as the Nordic Gamer — completed the Wojak dialectic by providing the format’s thesis and antithesis in a single template.

The format: on the left, a crying, panicking, or ranting Wojak (any variant). On the right, Yes Chad — square jaw, blonde hair, muscular neck, serene expression. The dialogue is always the same structure:

[Left Wojak, crying]: “Nooo you can’t just [do/say/believe X]! That’s [objection]!”

[Yes Chad]: “Yes.”

That’s it. That’s the entire meme. And it is devastating. “Yes.” is the most powerful rhetorical move available in internet argument: the complete refusal to engage with objections. Yes Chad doesn’t debate, explain, justify, or qualify. He simply is, and his being is sufficient. The meme works across every political orientation, every cultural position, every possible internet argument. It is a universal solvent for discourse.

Yes Chad also marks the point where Wojak became a complete emotional system. The original Wojak (sadness), Brainlet (stupidity), Pink Wojak (anguish), NPC (emptiness), Doomer (despair), Bloomer (recovery), Soyjak (inauthenticity), and Yes Chad (transcendence) — together, they cover essentially the entire human emotional and psychological spectrum, rendered in MS Paint.

The Crypto Face

Wojak occupies a unique position in cryptocurrency culture: he is the market’s emotional mirror. Where Pepe and Doge have associated tokens (PEPE, DOGE), Wojak is instead the feeling of holding those tokens.

Pink Wojak for losses. Smiling Mask Wojak (holding a happy mask over a crying face) for cope. Bobo (bearish Wojak) for short sellers. Bull Wojak (wide-eyed manic energy) for leveraged longs. Doomer Wojak for bear markets. Yes Chad for diamond-handing through drawdowns.

The 2022 crypto winter — Luna/UST collapse in May, FTX bankruptcy in November — produced the largest deployment of Wojak imagery in the meme’s history. Financial subreddits became galleries of Pink Wojak. “I am financially ruined” accompanied by the bald, screaming, pink-faced man was shared hundreds of thousands of times. It was simultaneously a confession, a joke, a coping mechanism, and a community bonding ritual. When everyone posts the same face, the pain becomes shared, and shared pain is more bearable than solitary suffering. Wojak’s original function — “I know that feel, bro” — was never more relevant than when people were watching their savings evaporate in real time.

Notably, despite being one of the three most significant memes in crypto culture (alongside Pepe and Doge), Wojak has never had a successful associated token. Multiple attempts have launched and failed. The lab’s hypothesis: Wojak’s power is in his universality, and universality resists commodification. You can’t buy a feeling. You can only feel it, post it, and wait for someone to reply with “I know that feel bro.”

The Mutation Tree

Wojak’s phylogenetic tree is the most extensive in the meme genome. The full catalog exceeds what any single lab report can contain, but the major branches are:

Emotional Branch: Original Feels Guy → Sad Wojak → Angry Wojak → Happy Wojak → Pink Wojak → Smiling Mask Wojak. These variants modify the core emotional expression while maintaining the original body.

Intellectual Branch: Brainlet → Expanding Brain → Galaxy Brain → Can’t Even Brain. These variants modify the skull/brain while maintaining the face.

Sociological Branch: NPC → Consoomer → Soyjak → Soyjak Pointing. These variants critique social behaviors and consumption patterns.

Demographic Branch: Doomer → Bloomer → Zoomer → Boomer → Coomer → Doomer Girl → Tradwife → Yes Chad. The -oomer pipeline that maps human archetypes onto Wojak bodies.

Financial Branch: Pink Wojak → Bobo → Bull Wojak → Smiling Mask Wojak → “I’m ruined” Wojak. Crypto-specific variants tied to market sentiment.

Each branch continues to produce new variants. Each variant can hybridize with variants from other branches. The combinatorial possibilities are effectively infinite, which is why Wojak produces new content faster than it can be cataloged and why the meme will never die. You cannot kill a meme that is everything. You can only watch it become more.

The Verdict

Wojak is the most mutated meme in internet history, and the mutation rate is accelerating. The original 2009 drawing — a sad, bald man with no features and no name — has produced a taxonomy of human psychology more detailed than most textbooks, a personality typology system more widely used than Myers-Briggs, and an emotional vocabulary more honest than most therapy sessions.

The genius of Wojak is that he is no one, and therefore he is everyone. Every person who has ever felt sad, angry, stupid, fake, hopeless, or triumphant has a Wojak that looks exactly like what they felt. The meme doesn’t describe emotions — it is the emotion, externalized, rendered in the crudest possible visual language, and shared with millions of strangers who looked at a bald MS Paint man and thought: yeah. That’s me.

Virality index: 10/10. Not for spread, not for cultural impact, not even for mutation rate — though all three are maximal. For the simple, unreplicable achievement of becoming the internet’s mirror. We are all Wojak. Feels bad, man. And sometimes, on good days, it feels good.